Easily Turn Your Automated Explanation Into a Predictive Model Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording
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Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn just how easy it is to build a predictive model from an automated explanation.
You will learn how to:
- Create an automated explanation in SAS Visual Analytics.
- Interpret the results of an automated explanation.
- Perform data exploration on financial services data.
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
In what version of SAS Visual Analytics did *automated explanations* become available?
I checked the documentation and saw that an Automated Analysis was available starting in version 8.3 of Visual Analytics.
Is visual part of the basic SAS package?
It depends on what version of SAS you have. However, I think the very basics of SAS Viya gives you access to things in addition to SAS Studio. You're going to have access to Visual Analytics. It's like a tiered package, but Visual Analytics, the automated explanation, and the automated predictions are all part of that base level of Viya. If you have access to Viya and you can open up Visual Analytics, you're going to be able to get to automated explanations.
How is association between explanatory variables shown?
If you open that details table, you'll see that there are one level decision trees that are used to determine which of these are the most significant.
Could you talk about the dataset used and best practices for dataset building for automated explanation? For this example, is it aggregated at the customer level, meaning each record is one customer and then the stats in the record are based on that customer's history?
That's a good question. You want raw data. You don't want aggregated data for your automated explanation because it's going to be able to do the aggregation for you. The table that I use, the VS_bank table, it turns out that each row is a unique customer. So, we have over 1,000,000 customers in there and a million independent customers. If I had data that had multiple rows per customer, I would not want to do that aggregation myself. I would want to let the automated explanation do it.
Automated explanation function is not included in SAS EG, correct?
That would be nice, wouldn't it? No, I'm afraid it's not. I'm an old Enterprise Guide user, so I know a lot of you are SAS coders. I went over to the dark side. I started in coding, and I got into Enterprise guide. That was my first venture into using point and click features and finding out how they can help me and sometimes allow me to get a report much more quickly than writing code. So, I'm totally with you, the automated explanation is not available there to you unfortunately from Enterprise Guide.
Is this model the best model with the best performance?
If you really want to start getting into model building, then what you'll want to do is you'll want to produce your own models like I created that logistic regression. We would start by building a logistic regression. Then we might choose two or three other models to consider if we want to stick with visual analytics. Let's say I build a logistic regression. I'm going to do an ensemble of trees like a forest, and I'm also going to do a neural network. I've got those three models here. In Visual Analytics, there is something called the model comparison object:
It will allow me to compare those three models using my favorite model fit statistic. Whether I want to use the KS statistic or the C statistic, it will share with me what the champion model is. Now, I will mention one other thing which is if you are really into building models and you want to build a whole bunch of models very quickly and then find the champion model, you might want to look at Model Studio. Model Studio allows you to build pipelines. Within those pipelines, you can have several different models, and you can build them very, very quickly. Sometimes the way that I like to talk about this is that if you want to get down and dirty into your own models and then start to pick your champion model, you may want to stick here to these objects and visual analytics. If you don't really want to get too down and dirty into the models, but you basically just want to take a whole bunch of models, throw them at the wall and see what sticks, Model Studio has some great features that will allow you to take that and do that.
What other objects are available in SAS Visual Analytics?
That is a great question, and I will show you. If we scroll up to the top of the Objects pane, you can see that it's got tables of your data.
It's got different graphs, like bar charts, bubble plots, heat maps, and time series plots. There are also Geo maps if you've got geographic data. If you're into building dashboards where you want to put a whole bunch of different charts together and have them interact, it's got controls. It's also got these basic analytics that are available to you. It'll do some forecasting. The simplest version of SAS Viya will give you some information, but you don't have a lot of flexibility. Down here, we've got a list of statistical objects, so things like nonparametric logistic regressions. We also have some machine learning objects like forest and gradient boosting. So, there are all kinds of different objects available in Visual Analytics. Depending on what version of Viya you have, you're going to get more and more functionality.
Recommended Resources
Automated Explanation in SAS Visual Analytics
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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